I think a lot of this 'I don't care about infrastructure' is specific to webapp programmers - If you write infrastructure that the SysAdmins like, we do celebrate you to a certain extent. Programmers (well, webapp programmers, and yeah, some of them do qualify as 'real programmers' in spite of the stereotype.) seem to be more MBA-influenced than SysAdmins, which I guess makes sense, if your business model is to build something cool and then have a MBA buy it.
Web app programmers care about infrastructure; hacker news wouldn't exist if we weren't constantly talking about it. Hell, even this rant from Zed is now on the top. Zed gets all the credit he can possibly get from Mongrel -- hell, I'm not even a RoR developer and I know he's the primary author. I use Apache, but I couldn't tell you who's in charge of it right now.
It seems strange to me that, as he says: "when I would try to get work, it was impossible for me to explain the magnitude of Mongrel’s impact". Who was he talking to in these companies? My point is that MBA's don't care about Mongrel. HR drones don't care about Mongrel. If that's who he wants to target, stop building the next mail server and start building to next twitter -- it's probably less technically interesting but you'll be more popular.
SysAdmins care primarily about infrastructure; webapp programmers, well, you have a point. I mean, the top two stories of this moment are clearly infrastructure. But they care about other things, too. SysAdmins exist so that developers don't need to focus on infrastructure.
Any webapp programmer worth knowing cares a lot about infrastructure. We might not be in charge of day-to-day operations, but we know it deeply shapes the end-user experience, and end-user experience is our whole raison d'être, whether that end-user is another programmer, a paid client, or somebody else.
sure, you care about it, but it's not what you do. Just like as a Unix SysAdmin, I care very deeply about power. Without good power, nothing I can do means jack. However, I know less about it than an electrician would, and (going back to Zed's comment) I wouldn't be able to name the people/companies who are famous for coming up with the high power switching technology required to keep my data center on-line.
